Companies or individuals often use an accounting or similar type of application for tracking financial and related data for an entity, such as for projects, customers, vendors, etc. Such accounting applications typically store entity information in a structured format, such as in one or more relational databases. By storing the data in a structured format, the data can be organized and analyzed in additional ways that are typically not available with unstructured data.
In some instances, a large amount of unstructured data also gets created for a particular entity in documents that reside on web sites, file servers, or other locations. Examples of such unstructured documents include detailed project specifications, web pages related to a project, a letter that was sent to a customer, and so on. Since the accounting applications do not handle this unstructured data, users have to separately track the unstructured data on their own so they can find it when they need to. In doing so, the user may have to switch between different types of applications to review the various data related to an entity, if the user is fortunate enough to even know where to find the data that exists outside of the accounting application.